Drive My Car Review

Hamaguchi expands a short Murakami story into three hours that never feel long, and the trick is that he front-loads the grief and then makes you sit with the routine that follows it. The forty minute prologue arrives before the title card, and everything after concerns a man driving to rehearsals for a multilingual Uncle Vanya he cannot bring himself to act in. The red Saab is the film's real stage: Yusuke listens to his dead wife's voice on a cassette rehearsing lines opposite him, while his driver Misaki says nothing at all for a very long time.

Hidetoshi Nishijima plays containment so precisely that the eventual break is devastating rather than cathartic, and Toko Miura matches him with almost no dialogue. The rehearsals, performed in Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and Korean Sign Language, turn the language barrier into the thesis: meaning survives translation, but only once the performing stops. The final signed monologue is one of the great scenes of the decade. Patient, exact, and entirely unhurried about earning any of it.